Fancy a course in Kodu?
Our Planet Kodu course will turn you into a Kodu Game Lab guru!
While what we plan to do week to week may be shuffled a little in the lead up to our course start date March 1st, this outline remains a good indication of the contents of the Kodu course.
If you haven’t done so already, register as a member on the Planet Kodu site and sign up. It’s free, and open to everyone!
Week 1 Getting Started with Kodu – Aquire the skills
Week one we’ll give you the skills to start building your Kodu games straight away! We’ll explore Kodu Game Lab together, introduce the concepts of design and navigation, and look how the best Kodu games are structured.
Week 2 How to build a prototype – fast!
Week two we explore the more formal elements of game design. We’ll take a look at how to find ideas, brainstorm game concepts and identify some of the risks when building your game.
Week 3 Game Mechanics – Designing challenging, engaging games
Week three we look at pushing your games to the next level. We’ll talk about how to determine powerful rules for your game, and use game actions and secrets effectively.
Week 4 The Game Experience – Theme and Story
Week four we take a look at the Kodu game space in more detail. We’ll explore the Kodu characters and the world they live in more closely.
We’ll look at how to build atmosphere in your game, and introduce rewards. Finally, we’ll talk about how to playtest your Kodu games and what you can learn from the process.
Week 5 Pushing the Boundaries – puzzles and probability
In our final week with Kodu Game Lab, we’ll explore how to implement games with an element of skill and chance. We’ll also look at different approaches to game design, with a comparison of game styles in our Head, Hands and Co-operation approach.
Take the Challenge!
Challenges are a great way to build your Kodu skills.
On Planet Kodu, you’ll find a range of challenges you can take to learn different programming techniques. When you think you’ve solved the challenge presented, upload your submission onto Planet Kodu so others can take a look.
Some challenges are straightforward, and are designed to equip you with some basic skills. Other challenges are quite complex.
Don’t forget though, that there’s help at hand if you get stuck. There are screencasts on the site that can walk you through some of the more complex problems.
You can also turn to the Planet Kodu community for guidance by asking a Kwestion. In fact, it’s likely that you’ll find your kwestion has already been asked by another member, and there’s an answer already waiting for you!
Planet Kodu v2
Today we are releasing what we are calling Planet Kodu version 2. It has been a lot of work but we’re really excited with the changes.
The biggest change is the introduction of the Kodu Kwestions part of the site and the announcement of the Game Design with Kodu course but we’ve also updated the challenges section.
Kodu Kwestions are wiki based kwestions (questions) and answers, designed to produce high quality information about game design and development with Kodu Game Lab. The aim of Planet Kodu Kwestions is to produce high quality kwestions and answers by mixing the best bits of forums, wikis and voting systems. We like it a lot.
We’ve launched Kodu Kwestions as beta, with some of the user restrictions being relaxed during the beta period. Once out of beta users will need a certain amount of points to vote and edit kwestions and answers, we will publish more about the points structure before we exit the beta stage. Kodu Kwestions replaces the tutorial and forum section of Planet Kodu, they are still there but we’ve removed the links from the top menu. We’ve started moving the content across and we plan to complete the migration this week. We must mention that Planet Kodu Kwestions owes alot to Stack Overflow for being the inspiration.
Please, check out Kodu Kwestions, ask a kwestion, but more importantly answer a kwestion!
The second major announcement is that Planet Kodu will host an open online course on Game Design with Kodu starting March 1st 2010.
The course will be open to everyone and totally free and involve blog posts, video and live sessions. We’re putting the curriculum together at the moment but we’ve posted the outline on the course overview page. Participants can contribute via the course website or by using their own blogs and other social media. To participate go to the Course blog and click on the sign up link in the side bar.
The third major change is the revamp of the Challenges section. We’ve taken advantage of the export and import functionality that has been introduced to Kodu Game Lab to make the challenge section really interesting. Firstly you download the challenge file and then once you’ve solved the challenge you can upload it as evidence of your success. Initially your solution will be listed as a proposed solution until someone else who is “qualified” accepts it. Those who have previously had a solution accepted for the challenge can assess other proposals or if some completes three different challenges then they can assess the solutions for any challenge. Make sense?
We’d love to hear to hear what you think of the changes, please use the comments below to let us know!
New version of Kodu released
Microsoft have released a new, and more stable version of Kodu.
Version 1.0.23 offers significant improvements in terms of stability. It also resolves previous difficulties encountered when attempting to play uploaded games of a more recent version of Kodu.
Export / Import Bug
Update: The version 1.0.23.0 is now available from http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu/ and fixes this bug. It also fixes and properly imports worlds that contain the bug.
It has been brought to my attention that there is a bug with the Export and Import process. On further investigation the bugs appears to effect both 1.0.21.0 Technical Preview Beta and the 1.0.22.0 Academic Beta, those still working 1.0.16.0 should be fine.
I’ve spent a while looking into this and it appears that the folder which the files are located has changed from “MyWorlds” to “Downloads”. There are two possible short term fixes.
1. Move the files from Downloads to MyWorlds (including the files in the Stuff folder these go in the MyWorlds/Stuff folder
or,
2. Open the xml files in the Download folder in notepad and edit the StuffFileName value change MyWorlds to Download
These fixes only apply with 1.0.21.0 and 1.0.22.0, games exported from the 1.0.16.0 version are not affected.
I’ll email the Kodu developers and make them aware of this and hopefully their will be a permanent fix soon.
New Video Tutorials
We’ve created a number of screencasts (video tutorials) to help get you going with Kodu Game Lab.
There are five tutorials available so far:
1 Introduction to toolbars and navigation
2 Creating a Timer or Countdown Clock
3 Using creatables to make a portal or multi-level game
4 Adding combat to games
5 Uploading a game to Planet Kodu
The screencasts are also available for download, currently only in WMV but we plan to add other video formats in the near future.
Planet Kodu Open to all!
We’re please to announce that anyone can now register on Planet Kodu!
Kodu Technical Beta Is Out!
The Technical Beta for Kodu is available to download from today at http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu/ and to celebrate we have opened Planet Kodu to everyone.
Planet Kodu is still very much a work if you find a bug or something that is missing please email Richard at olsen.richard.r@edumail.vic.gov.au
Keeping an Eye on the Resource Meter
Kodu is designed to make small games and the bigger your game gets the slower it will run.
The Resource Meter lets you know how many resources you are currently using and therefore is good practice to try to keep it as low as possible.
If the resource meter gets too high consider making your world smaller or reducing your code. Some code is less efficent, try not to use “when I hear” too often as it is expensive to run. You can turn the Resource Meter on and off in the settings.
Being responsible, respectful & and ethical in the digital world
“Text unto others as you would have them text unto you” has become the 21st century guide to behaviour in the digital world. Netiquette, or net etiquette goes beyond basic courtesy and privacy when you communicate with other people using the internet or mobile phones as it underpins the assumption that you will do your utmost to act within the laws of society and cyberspace.
Communicating electronically makes it impossible to ‘read’ another person’s response or reaction to your words. We lose all of the non verbal cues such as facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures which guide the interaction and often what we say is misconstrued or misunderstood. To help avoid this, the usage of emoticons can be a useful tool to aid in communicating your thoughts.
So it’s important to remember that that there are real people out there and if you wouldn’t say it person, don’t say it online.
How you meet the conventions of communicating in the digital world sometimes depends on the community or service you are using.
If you are creating and playing games, emailing, sending instant messages, texting using a mobile phone, creating content for your personal website or profile or posting comments on others’ profiles, blogs or wikis there are protocols that you are expected to observe.
One common thread through them all, however, is that while there are variations in how to behave appropriately between communities using similar technologies, the expected standards of behaviour should reflect those you share in the real world.
In online groups it’s advisable to initially explore the domain you have entered to read and listen to the chats or other forms of communication taking place to get a sense of the way other people are behaving.
Netiquette Guidelines
- Be clear and brief about what you want to say and that your email, text or instant message or profile reflects your content.
- Using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is considered ‘shouting’.
- What you say or do online is reflection of who you are so be selective about what you will share publicly and review or edit your words before sending or posting them.
- Only forward emails you receive with the permission of the sender and do not change the wording.
- All content can be traced back to the sender or administrator of a social networking service so consider this before doing something anonymously.
- Observe copyright laws and seek permission before using or sharing images, music or other content. Remember to cite the source.
- Help out the new players. You were a new player, too, once. Be helpful to new players and show them the ropes, you may even make a new friend.
- Flaming emails are heated or abusive and should be ignored. You can block the sender so you don’t receive them again.
- Learn the terminology. Players often create their own language of abbreviations for online games, like using AFK for Away From Keyboard. If you’re going to be playing with other experienced players, you could easily get confused. Make an effort to learn the terminology, so that you can understand everyone and join in.
This is a guest post from Robyn Treyvaud
Ratings
Did you know that you can rate the games on Planet Kodu?
When you’re logged in you can rate each game out of five starts with five being the best. When rating thing about whether the game was fun to play, whether it showed creativity and whether it demonstrated something new about Kodu.
Here is a list of the current highest rated games.
Update: Ratings have been temporarily disabled as they were causing the site to slow down
Welcome to Planet Kodu
Planet Kodu is place where students and teachers can share what they are doing with Kodu.
We’ve had a lot of fun making Planet Kodu and we’re hoping that over the next few months well see lots of fantastic worlds and games created.
What can you do now?
Start exploring the site, reading the tutorials
You can also share your games and worlds here. Whenever you upload a game or world to the Kodu Community, it will appear on Planet Kodu. Then others can ask you questions or give you feedback.
